The following days were filled with visits from relatives, neighbors, and friends. Day after day they came, and day after day we talked about everything but the obvious. They took their cues from me. My post-hospital euphoria was gone.
Sue would arrive each morning. Her joie de vivre was infectious; she lifted all spirits—except mine. Nevertheless, whenever I slipped into solitude, her buoyancy drew me out of myself. She even persuaded me to attend a friend’s engagement party. Horror filled me at the idea of exposing myself in my newly deformed state. It was the prelude to the rest of my new life.
As it turned out, the party was every bit as unpleasant as I had imagined. Sue stayed by my side, guiding me around the room. Her laughter filled the air, but I could feel, or imagine, that our friends were staring at me. The evening could not end soon enough.
But home and home-cooking were sources of great comfort during this time. My mother, Sue, my siblings, and my father did everything they could to make life easier for me.
Mostly I moved around the house and neighborhood by myself, slowly, tentatively, and awkwardly. Chains—black, heavy chains—seemed to rattle around my body, my every movement limited, cautious, and above all fearful. Sue, seeing me grimace, would try to alleviate the weight of the chains by holding my hand and guiding me. But I could hardly wait till evening so I could take my sleeping pill and drift away from the present. Each day seemed the same, filled with the same visits and the same chatter—all calculated to avoid recognition of the all too obvious.
Then again, actually recognizing my blindness was just as disturbing. Witness the social worker who stopped by our house to discuss my options for the future. A thin older woman with once-blonde hair turning gray, according to Sue, her face was unremarkable except that she had thin lips. She had a quiet, unaccented voice, and she used no colloquialisms. It was as if she simply appeared on our porch in Buffalo, out of nowhere.
Sue and I sat side by side in chairs like an old married couple. I did feel old—old, tired, and more than a little helpless. The social worker arranged papers and handed some to Sue. (I could hear this.) She said that Sue and I should take a drive out to the country. Some of the blind people she had helped—mainly men, for some reason—had become justices of the peace. There were other options, too, she told Sue (as if I were not there). She was matter-of-fact about my possibilities. As she saw it, I had very few of them. Aside from being a justice of the peace, she said in her flat tone, I could make screwdrivers or cane chairs. I was stupefied.
At the woman’s direction, Sue drove me out to places that made Buffalo look like Midtown Manhattan—towns and villages hardly anybody knew of, mostly surrounded by farms and forest. Sue told me that the blind local justices of the peace sat in rocking chairs on their porches, looking as if they had had the life sucked out of them.
Sue pulled into a gravel driveway in front of a wooden building where we were told there was going to be a wedding. One of the blind men we had heard about would be presiding. Sue led me in, and we sat at the back. The couple being married were certainly farmers. The man, perhaps my age, was trying to stand up straight, but something in his back seemed to prevent him from doing so. He was arched at the shoulders. The bride was a heavyset woman, almost pretty. The justice of the peace, I was told, was wearing a gray suit and had on dark glasses to hide eyes that would presumably alarm people if they were to be seen. He sounded practiced but detached—possessing not a bit of joy in his voice. Members of the couple’s families were present, but they were few. The building was not a church; there were no pews, just rows of chairs. Unaccountably, drawings done by schoolchildren lined the walls.
The ceremony was unremarkable. Up until a point, those two kids had been unmarried, and then, suddenly, they were married. That was it.
“They’re done,” Sue said.
I could hear the wedding party walking out of the building and into the dusty air. I could also hear the tapping of the justice’s cane against the floor. He moved deliberately but quickly. Sue went up to him to say that she had been told we should speak with him, if he had time. Her boyfriend had just gone blind, or was blind, or, well—if he could find the time to speak to me, we would really appreciate it. He said he would, but he did not say that he would be happy to or that he was sorry to hear about my condition. He was not going to give me solace. He was going to tell—no more, no less.
We three sat on a bench outside. The justice of the peace asked us what we wanted to know, and I said I just wanted to get a sense of how he got around. He said, “I use a cane.” I asked him how he got from one place to another. He said he lived in the village, but if he needed to go farther, there was a bus. I asked, foolishly, “What if you need to go into Buffalo?” He looked at me—I could feel his dark eyeglasses on me—but said nothing. I thought that was strange. Clearly, he felt the question was strange. Outrageous, even, as if he were on the verge of saying, “Why in the world would I go to Buffalo, young man?”
After that, I did not speak. Sue did the talking,
